Canadian Olympian Alannah Yip talks 'empowering' decision to embrace hair loss: 'I was losing enormous amounts of hair'

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Canadian sport climber Alannah Yip is speaking out about hair loss and her previous health struggles ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. During a recent episode of Team Canada's podcast, Momentum, the 30-year-old spoke to Canadian luger Arianne Jones, about living with alopecia, an autoimmune disorder.

After competing at the Toyko 2020 Olympic Games, Yip told Jones that she had done "a lot of work mentally" which culminated in her bronze medal win at the 2023 Pan American Games.

"I felt like myself, I was happy, I felt powerful, and I felt like I had an amazing mindset that competition," Yip said. "And then I went through alopecia, and I think that has made me less self-conscious, which is a good thing."

Alopecia is a blanket term for an autoimmune disorder that attacks the body's hair follicles and results in hair loss either in patches (alopecia areata), all over the scalp (alopecia totalis) or hair loss over the entire body (alopecia universalis).

In January 2024, Yip made the decision to share her alopecia diagnosis on Instagram. "It felt a bit cathartic in a way," she told Jones. "I didn't feel like I had much of a choice. I was losing enormous amounts of hair, and then I decided to shave my head so I was going be bald."

According to Yip, her hair loss happened quickly. In her Instagram post, she recalled "holding fistfuls" of hair while crying.

"It had been a month of a lot of mental struggle, but a lot of learning for me, learning about myself and making some big decisions about who I wanted to be, how I wanted to show up," Yip told Jones. "And that was part of the reason that I decided to share my journey on Instagram."

The Vancouver-born athlete called the decision to embrace her hair loss a "very empowering moment."

"I was really afraid to go into the climbing gym. I wanted to wear a hat all of the time, or I wanted to keep my hair clipped up in a way that you couldn't really see it, but I was not climbing the way that I can," she explained. "....I had it in the back of my head, 'Oh, don't whip your head very fast, because your hat will fall off and then people will see.' It turns out that I'm the one who cares most about my hair."

After speaking with her sports psychologist, Yip said she knew she had to let go of her fear. “I was not doing myself any favours by trying to hide it," she said. "I was not climbing as well.”

Yip shared her struggles with body image and an eating disorder, which she says she used as a "coping mechanism" to deal with feeling "very lonely" in high school. Although she doesn't point to climbing as the cause for her eating disorder, she noted that weight is talked about very frankly in the sport, which is a "weight to strength—based sport."

"It's taken me a long time to come to this, but climbing has been probably the biggest part of my healing from that because when I'm climbing, I feel strong and I feel powerful," she shared. "I don't feel tiny or delicate. Climbing makes me feel alive... it makes me feel strong."

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